Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
Can’t a corporation just enter the space whenever they want to? Can’t they start or even buy out larger instances? Even if Lemmy does take off, wouldn’t this inevitably happen anyway if the space gets popular enough?
The big players do definitely try to shut down independent email. We don’t have to let them succeed though, and the way to fight back is to host your own.
Edit: *one way to fight back.
Hmm. If what you were saying was true, then a lot of new Lemmy instance operators would be having problems with email verification.
Lemmy allows using any smtp server to send emails. Can use Googles servers, fastmails servers etc.
It’s different from running your own email server. If you run your own, then Google and the others are definently not going to trust it. There are lots of blog posts about the pain of running your own email server.
There are literally no problems running your own server if you comply with anti spam measures.
Most germans are on gmx.net, and they block residential ips. So it’s impossible to send them messages. So i had to abandon my efforts.
You shouldn’t run email server from a residential IP address. That’s one of the conditions how you comply with anti spam measures.
?? then clearly, i CANNOT run an email server? without buying my way into a higher status of ip address?
i can host fedi from residential ip’s, and that’s a huge part why it’s possible for us to talk right now (of course, i need cloudflares help for this, since i have no ipv4 address - but other than that)
I don’t see this as a problem. It’s not like VPS is a luxury and costs a fortune. You’ll waste more money on powering your PC 24/7.
A VPS is basically just a complicated way of making an account with a large infrastructure provider imo if i can’t have a raspberry pi, that costs only electricity, and have it host an email server
the protocol is not open! at least it is more closed than i’d like - it’s open enough for companies, granted
Not that guy but I see the confusion here. What he really means is self host which could mean running something in your garage or could mean running something on a VPS as long as you’re doing it yourself. You can definitely self host email. You can even run it in your garage you just need to tunnel through a VPS or something with a non residential IP.
Suree in the grand sheme of things getting a non-residential ip shouldn’t be too hard
But i still think it’s one of those pieces of red tape that have killed a lot of diversity
This is absolutely a reason to close your home server -i mean if you’re buying an VPS anyway that uses the same bandwidth it would use with the server set up there
Why keep a server in your garage? And then you’re not truely independent anymore, because of a small policy somewhere
I DO think garage hosting is an important part of an ecosystems freedom.
I can garage host fedi, and i AM in this very moment. For web services it’s just DOS Protection that we need Men in the Middle for. Which is sad but, actually not an artificial requirement.
How does that work, complying with anti spam measures?
You need a fixed, non-residential IP address. You need a domain name with SPF. You need to set up DKIM. And you need to set up DMARC.
In theory, you only need DMARC, but some old email software somewhere might not support it.
And then you can use services like https://www.mail-tester.com/ to check if everything is set up correctly.
I’ve had hosted email from a service provider for years and never had a problem. I’m not talking anyone big here.
This is truly not meant to be snarky: It sounds like you don’t know how email works.